CULTURE SHOCK

What's new, what's new....

Things are going quite well. I did have my first serious bout of Culture Shock (tm) last night. I had decided to go to a synagogue, to a) have an evening of 'something familiar', and b) to see if there were people around here that I might be interested in meeting.

I walked from Charing Cross Station to the synagogue, which is around Marble Arch. This may or may not mean anything to you. At any rate, this involved a long walk up Charing Cross Road, and then another fairly decent stretch down Oxford Street. The only reason this is important is that both streets were outrageously crowded.

I got to the synagogue, really had no problem finding it. It's a beautiful old building, although doesn't look terrifically like a synagogue from the outside. I wonder if this is intentional--I know that there's quite a bit of anti-Semitism here.

Anyway, the idea of going to a Reform synagogue for Something Familiar was a spectacular failure. Firstly, the prayer books are all in Hebrew and not Transliterated Hebrew, which is what I'm familiar with. Secondly, they spoke most of the liturgy instead of chanting/singing it. And they spoke it very quickly, so I was madly trying to speak just the words to all of the Hebrew chants, but couldn't keep up if my life depended on it.

The parts of the liturgy that *were* put to music were sung by a choir--to entirely different tunes than I've ever heard. Instead of sounding kind of like Middle Eastern chant, these sounded like Bach Chorales or something.

The few things that I was used to speaking instead of singing, well, they use completely different phrasing here.

All in all, I was not exactly experiencing a sense of the familiar.

The Rabbi, who happens to be an American, delivered a 'sermon' on "Isn't it Great to be a Jew?" Er, um, not exactly the sort of thing I'm used to.

I stayed for a second service, which was an 'alternative' service. It was a bit more familiar. I actually recognized two tunes, on the Oseh Shalom B'imromav, and the, uh, something else. Not the Amidah. Maybe it was just the Hineh Ma Tov they sang at the end or something.

At any rate, I realized that I have about as much in common with the people in that room as a Hostess Twinkie.

The funny thing was that it was an Erev Shabbat service, and this was clearly a Reform synagogue, because people were pulling up in taxi cabs. And at the Alternative service, they mentioned how they appreciated the difficulty people must have had getting there with the current Tube situation. For those of you in the crowd who don't know this, Orthodoxy types believe that it's wrong to 'work' a car or train or whatever on the Sabbath. Sheer rubbish, of course, but that's what they go with.

So anyway, the combination of huge crowds of people who don't even moderately resemble me or what I'm used to, an almost totally unfamiliar synagogue experience, and then a two-hour-long commute home in a very crowded tube/railway, made me feel a) claustrophobic, b) completely out of my element, and c) a little freaked out.

I realized that some of my culture shock has to do with the fact that I'm from Alaska. There are maybe 2500 people in my hometown on a good day, and it's 100 miles from the closest town. This many people all in one place, with squished-in buildings and narrow streets, makes me *extremely* claustrophobic. I literally felt like I couldn't get enough air last night. I realized that I felt that way most of the time I was here last, and it's amazing how much just identifying one of the things that is bothering you seems to begin to alleviate the problem.

Another thing is that this country is *extremely* looks-conscious. Sexual attitudes and attitudes toward nudity are more 'open,' and this huge emphasis is put on sex and physical attraction, compared to the US. The look of people who are considered attractive is different, and people in general are more condescending about people who don't fit into their acceptable ranges of whatever. It's like...if you have terrible skin, you're a part of a lower, more uneducated class, and you're looked down on as actually stupid or intellectually inferior.

Americans are necessarily intellectually inferior, and fat people are both intellectually inferior, and not part of the cool, 'mod' crowd that it's important to be a member of.

It's strange. I'm used to a kind of anti-intellectualism and emphasis on physical appearance that you run into in the US, but it's mostly just that--a kind of anti-intellectualism. The 'point' of being an educated person in the US is that you are liberal and open to many different types of people and lifestyles. Here, the 'point' of being an educated/liberal person is that you have those things as an excuse to be really acidically hateful toward others.

Anyway, so a lot of things were making me feel culture shock, but I realized what one big part was had to do with a feeling of losing identity. If I stay here, then am I going to become someone who goes to a Reform synagogue? Because some of the things which I identify with a sense of 'self' don't exist here. There is no good Messianic synagogue, for example. I have this life that is based on, well, I like this brand of cheese or I do this silly thing that DOESN'T EXIST IN THE UK.

Again, identifying the problem really helped. I realized how much I was trying to cling to Matthew last time I was here just because he was something from Me. I loved him in the US. And I had some kind of expectation that he would help me find the me that would exist over here, but every time I tried, I'd run into another thing that would just make me feel more unfamiliar and out of place.

For example, he talked a *lot* about the way other women looked. The one woman 'friend' that he introduced me to, he informed me later in the evening that he wanted to sleep with her. And then she invited me to do something with her, and with a woman who Matthew had gone on a date with when he'd told me we were 'exclusive,' and then lied about it later when I asked him.

But a lot of my problem with that sort of thing had to do with the fact that the culture itself is so looks-conscious and so sex-conscious and so overridden with innuendo, that seeing it in my own boyfriend was just too much for me and made me feel like even that relationship was unsafe. All of it was unsafe. And Matthew was dealing with his own feelings of uncertainty about the relationship, and felt duty-bound to tell me that I couldn't count on him, because he didn't want me to do so and then be hurt later. Not just that, but, well, it wasn't just the culture that looked down on me and judged me as inferior and different and less sophisticated because I'm an American. My boyfriend did as well.

It was really good to identify this stuff last night.

So...what did I do about it? Well, firstly I calmed myself down. The claustrophobia thing was just something that I had to identify and acknowledge, and then take some steps like going to the end of the rail platform, where there were no other people. I had to wait and calmly count tube stops before then, but claustrophobia is a pretty standard fear that's a bit easy to talk yourself down from. Calm thoughts like, "It's all right, there are just three tube stops left to go, roughly three minutes per stop, so that's only nine minutes. This train ride has an end. If you need to take a train out to the country this weekend, you can do that if you need." It wasn't too bad.

Then I reminded myself that when I moved to the States, I underwent culture shock and fear, and that it took a relatively short period of time after I moved before things that had seemed so daunting became familiar and mundane. When I moved to San Francisco, it was the same way. So this is the same. Things won't always seem so odd. I won't always miss all of the references. When someone says, "Suits you, sir," someday it will seem as normal to me as someone saying, "Well, isn't that special?"

I reminded myself that I am a terrifically strong person, and that my identity isn't really based on a brand of cheese. Those are just things I like, they're not who I am. Being Messianic Jewish is something I believe, yes, and so it's more part of who I am. But I've lived plenty of places where there were no other Messianic Jews. And I'll be just fine.

And then I made the active decision to be happy. Yes, my friend Brad is hurt awfully and in the hospital. Yes, I'm worried about my sisters. Yes, yes, yes. I will be happy. Strong is who I am. Capable is who I am. Emerging from chaos and saying, No, you will not destroy me, is who I am.

Then there was this kind of weird thing where I remembered that the truth tastes a certain way. It's like when I was in the synagogue and they said a couple of really weird things, it contributed to my sense of shock because they were saying things that I know to be wrong. And I wondered if someday these strange things would seem normal. Er, that's kind of it. It's also a bit about...well, I'm conscious, for example, of the difference in sexual attitudes. (Mind you, I feel perfectly at ease with open sexuality in San Francisco. Over here, the sexual openness is just...different. Instead of being an attitude of...liberated catharsis, for lack of a better phrase, here it's more like they look so bloody down on everyone else. Nobody else is as cool, educated, and whatever as them. So bloody negative.) Is the attitude here 'wrong' or just different? Should I force myself to agree with it, saying that I need to be culturally sensitive to differences, or is that giving up my identity, or just being wrong? If I adopt that belief, do I end up adopting these weird beliefs at the Reform synagogue as well? Even there, I got the sense that if you didn't adopt their beliefs, they would believe that you were less educated, worldly, and sophisticated as them.

At any rate, I guess I gave myself permission to believe in my own discernment again. I know how the truth tastes. And I will be fine. It's all right to look at this culture and decide to accept things and to reject others.

And I realized that I have never completely assimilated into any place I've been. I've always stood a little outside of things, choosing what to accept and what not to. And *that* is myself. And I'm not going to be afraid any longer. I'm not going to want to cling to anyone. That's never been me before, and when I got here I felt like I wanted to have that option for a change. But not having that option isn't something that was forced on me--it was a decision I made.

So anyway, things got better.

And I went back to synagogue this morning, and it was perhaps worse than it was last night. I don't mean worse as in I was more culture-shocked. I'm actually feeling quite good and back inside myself again. I just mean that the service was terrible. Bloody Happy to be a Jew stuff again. I swear, I could hear Mel Brooks singing a bastardized version of "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid," only it was about Judaism. None of the people at this synagogue believe anything--or at least very few of them do. It's all about being part of the Community. And know what? That's bloody wrong.